We performed a comparison between Cisco Umbrella and Netskope CASB based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco Umbrella is widely considered the leader in the marketplace. Users feel the process of restricting access or filtering out what content end users can view or go to (including blocking known malicious sites) and the comprehensive monitoring of user activity make Cisco Umbrella a complete solution. Reviewers feel Netskope currently lacks visibility with user endpoint devices and should have better integrations with other third-party products.
"The single-pane-of-glass management is very important. We have a very small team. We can't spend a lot of time going from product to product to product to either investigate or set up policy. We need to have one place that we can go to and set everything up."
"I was able to implement it myself. It was really easy to install. You could install it on a server locally if you want to. If you have the biggest site, you would do that, but for my site, it was just directing all the traffic out through the Cisco Umbrella DNS. It was really handy. When the owners of the company went overseas, I knew that they would be secure because even if they were not on the company network, they would still go through the Cisco Umbrella servers. It was a complete solution for protecting the company with outgoing data."
"The integration features within, for example, the Cisco VPN product and the Umbrella module are valuable."
"A single pane of glass saves time... This does have a lot of options available for us to see who's doing what, what trends, what errors. We can set up our alerting through it as well. It is definitely a great dashboard."
"Any time someone went off the network, the AnyConnect client had the Umbrella agent built in, and it would realize when their computer connected that they were not on the corporate network. It would monitor and they would have pretty close to the same rules that they had to follow when they were in the office, regarding what kind of website browsing they could do."
"One of the most important features is the security posture check which Umbrella offers when a user accesses any website. That is one of the most unique features that it offers."
"I like the original functionality, which allows for providing secure DNS services."
"If it didn't have a single pane of glass, we would not be using it. The single pane of glass gives you a one-stop shop. It's like going to Home Depot. You find all your stuff there. You can see all your threats and your endpoints. It's a very important feature and makes things very simple."
"The solution offers a better understanding of the real scenario and identifies the cloud apps that are being utilized."
"The client size and architectural components in Netskope are far better than other solutions."
"The detection capability is very nice and lightweight."
"Netskope is a really good product. I cannot segregate which features are the most valuable. We find most of the features to be valuable. It gives us what we are looking for."
"The most useful feature of this solution is Cloud Control, which allows me to schedule cloud uploads."
"A feature that was valuable was the built-in website classification or safety ratings. Different websites would be rated according to analyses that the Netskope team had done, and we built policies on some of those scores. If the website scored less than a certain percentage, then we would have a different user experience around how the site would interact with the clients."
"Amazing reporting and tracking mechanisms."
"The interface is good."
"The firewall capabilities could be better. Cisco is starting to introduce some layer 7 capabilities now, but there's still some room to grow. They should continue with the development of Umbrella so that it is a full-blown cloud-managed firewall solution."
"The integration with other solutions is a little complex. If you want to integrate with something like ArcSight or LogRhythm or Splunk, you need to do a lot of configuration. There are no easy ways to implement it."
"There are some situations where we would like to block things for specific user groups. I know that Umbrella does that, but it's not that easy.... when you want a specific task for specific rules and policies for user groups, you have to go three levels down in the menu, and it's hard to find where you do that task."
"The design of the screens could be improved. Sometimes you're trying to look for information, for what you think is critical that should be on that first screen of the dashboard so that you can quickly take screenshots to have people help out, but you have to hop between screens to find little pieces of evidence."
"They can maybe simplify the configuration. For example, sometimes, the proxy part is quite difficult, and that's why we didn't deploy that."
"One of the issues with Umbrella is as you get into endpoint detection and response, such as EDR point solutions, some of them will not integrate well with Umbrella. Sometimes when you want to use technology, such as Always On VPN, it will not work. There are some looming issues as one type of technology starts to crossover with Umbrella. That is the challenge and Umbrella should find a way to be more compatible with some of the endpoint response solutions that are coming out on the market."
"Network connectivity was a bit of a challenge at the beginning, but we were able to get the right help from Cisco."
"Its on-prem rollout is quite challenging. It needs better coordination with the Internet Service Provider. It is a cloud-based solution, and any endpoint that connects to it has to go through all the gateway ISPs, but some of the ISPs block HTTPS-based DNS. That's where the challenge occurs with Umbrella."
"In some cases, when you have a lot of policies, it can get confusing for users and you can get lost in the GUI."
"Netskope CASB can improve by working more similarly to a VPN technology instead of a proxy. They then could have visibility on the endpoint device. Most clients have some tools where they check the endpoint health or other things, such as the security posture, or if they want to access the resources. For example, if they should have antivirus running, this kind of posture check should be available but it is missing."
"There should be some granular custom roles that are not available. However, this is on the road map. There are many devices that do not have the Zero Trust feature and other enhancements available which they should have."
"There could be better integration with other solutions."
"There could be room for improvement in the subscription process."
"The configuration and user behaviour analytics can be improved."
"Deployment and policy tweaking were two areas where improvement needs to be made."
"Support services could definitely be improved. Support is the one area that can always use improvement. It's an evolving thing, so based on demand and based on market requirement and the way market is moving towards."
Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 39 reviews while Netskope CASB is ranked 3rd in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 12 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Netskope CASB is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "We can see all of our locations in one place and only have to make changes once for all our locations". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netskope CASB writes "Network proxy that provides visibility during deployment and allows you to control PII". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security, Fortinet FortiGate SWG and Azure DNS, whereas Netskope CASB is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma SaaS by Palo Alto Networks, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Skyhigh Security. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Netskope CASB report.
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